tiresome but nonetheless always sure of itself

Category: Quickies

– The bombshell NYT report that emails sent to and from Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort – the closest advisors to Trump in the Summer of 2016 – all show clear intention and follow through to collude with a foreign power to use their government’s resources to smear another candidate in a presidential election. It’s not really surprising considering who we’re talking about. Paul Manafort was an agent of the Russian government in Ukraine, Jared Kushner is a sniveling nincompoop whose only accomplishment is to […]

– Imagine a woman who sells everything she owns to afford her child’s chemotherapy. – This woman must now work two or three jobs to afford her debt and a measly apartment in a rundown part of town. The kid survives but now attends an underfunded school, and has less parental help because her mom is so stressed and busy. When she turns 18, there is no money for college, in fact, she’s had to keep a job of her own for years to help pay the bills and is struggling […]

– MERCUTIO I see Queen M.O.A.B. hath been with you. She is the devil’s midwife, and she comes In shape much bigger than an agate-stone Pushed by the finger of an orange man, Drawn by a team of sub-atomics To scorch men’s faces as they lie asleep; Her chariot is an giant flaming skull Made by Lockheed Martin or Boeing Time out o’ mind the devil’s coachmakers. And in this state she gallops night by night Through native’s brains, and then they dream of death; O’er dictator’s knees, that dream […]

When I was a young boy, whenever I went to a public library, I would always search for books on two subjects: Nazis, and nuclear weapons. I think this was because the biggest myths of my young life were told by Steven Spielberg. Reading about the realities of those two ideas: German fascism – its roots in Enlightenment philosophies, populist politics and art – and the successful construction of a machine so powerful it could incinerate an entire city, and destroy the planet, those seemed like the most important things to […]

I know they’re AT&T ads, but I remember watching these and being so excited for the future. Yesterday, I actually looked up how much a virtual reality headset costs. My car drives on half electricity generated when I brake. These videos make me flush with gratitude for how tech has changed our world. But I also see that really nothing big has changed. The advances demonstrated in this video are largely conveniences meant to help people consume more quickly and work during their vacations, and making face to face communications obsolete through video screens. Almost everyone in these videos is alone. The in-person interactions are incidental. (The exception is the athlete receiving medical care, which stands out as a humane and very necessary deployment of tech. Sagefully, the patient’s health is of utmost importance to a major American corporate entity – his NFL team – making his recovery not a self evident matter of good fortune for a person and his family, but because he gets back on the field, the season is saved, blah blah blah.) Commerce will self-innovate, businesses will always look for ways to improve themselves to out compete the next business or address new needs and pain points for consumers. But tech and money can’t solve problems that exist between people. They can only make the conversations more predictable and less frequent, less intimate, they insulate the richest people from the poorest people, and provide a dim […]

Click over to the Guardian to see protesters in Kiev pull down the statue of Lenin, and read about how statues – invisible symbols of entrenched and assumed power in our everyday lives – becoming sitting ducks during an expression of revolutionary disobedience. Since the dawn of man, in our freest moments we have torn the idols down. Some pics from RT: Direct link to video: http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/dec/09/kiev-ukraine-protesters-statue-lenin-video